For me, Bush's legacy from "As We May Think" connects directly to the very real and important potential for Boosting the Collective IQ of the social organisms represented by human organizations. The companies, institutions -- indeed the countries -- which most seriously and effectively pursues this potential would clearly have a strong success/survival advantage. Aside from that, for humanity as a whole to survive in a healthy and "humanized" social, political, economic and ecological environment may well depend upon how soon and effectively we explicitly pursue this potential.Serious pursuit will involve many changes in the way (as) we may think, coordinated with many concurrent changes in "as we may work" -- and as we may collaborate, share, play new roles, exercise new/different skill and methodology sets, etc. In short, it will involve radical new ways to couple humans' fundamental sensory, motor, mental, and learning capabilities to the tasks of collectively developing, integrating and applying knowledge.
Effective pursuit would require a strategic approach, whose acceptance would most certainly involve key shifts in some prevaling paradigms. I would like to describe them and their relative roles within a candidate "bootstrapping" strategy for pursuing significant improvement in large-scale, Collective IQ.
Technology is only one of the important elements in the strategy -- within that element would be a critcal need for an accelerated evolution of an Open Hyperdocument System, with appropriate goals for generalized functionality, application domains, interoperability, and scalability. The thrilling emergence of WWW/HTML has provided a critically important impetus; I'd like to describe some candidates for next-stage evolution toward that OHS target.
on the web
Abstract
http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY95-96/events/bush/r10.html